Penal ’common sense’ comes to Europe

Could it be mere coincidence? As gigantic industrial and financial mergers are sweeping across the United States and Europe, to the seeming indifference of the governments concerned, political leaders everywhere are vying with each other to think up and implement new ways of “cracking down” on crime. The mainstream media, often forgetting that “urban violence” is rooted in the generalisation of social insecurity, contribute with their own biases to defining these alleged threats to society. Many of the remedies commonly proposed (’zero tolerance’, curfews, suspension of social allowances to offenders’ families, increased repression of minors) take their inspiration from the American model. And, as in the United States, they are bound to lead to the extension of social control compounded with exploding rates of imprisonment.

For the past several years now a moral panic has been welling up across Europe that is capable, through its scope and virulence, of redirecting government policies and durably reshaping the structure of the societies it affects. Its apparent object - indeed too apparent since it tends to hog public debate - is “youth”delinquency, “urban violence”, and the disorders for which “sensitive neighbourhoods” are taken to be the breeding ground, along with the “incivilities” of which their inhabitants are supposed to be the greatest victims and foremost perpetrators. There are so many terms that one is well-advised to keep in quotation marks, since their meaning is as vague as the phenomena they are alleged to designate - phenomena of which nothing proves that they are in any way specific to ’youths’, to certain ’neighbourhoods’, and still less that they are ’urban’. Yet these terms seem to be self-evident. They swell the speeches of politicians, they saturate the daily papers, they invade television.

Now, these notions did not spring spontaneously, ready-made, from reality. They are part of a constellation of terms and theses that come from the United States, on crime, violence, justice, inequality and responsibility, which have insinuated themselves into the European debate to the point of serving as its framework and focus, and they owe their power of persuasion to their sheer omnipresence and to the prestige regained by their originators.1 The banalisation of these terms and theses conceals a stake that has little to do with the problems to which they ostensibly refer: namely, the redefinition of the mission of the state, which is everywhere withdrawing from the economic arena and asserting the need to reduce its social role and to enlarge - as well as harden - its penal intervention.

The expressions in quotation marks are those of Beaumont and Tocqueville, “The Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France,” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard, Paris, 1984, vol. IV, p. 11.